{"id":46297,"date":"2019-05-22T13:23:50","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T18:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=46297"},"modified":"2019-05-22T13:25:45","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T18:25:45","slug":"99-lead-balloons-are-about-to-come-crashing-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=46297","title":{"rendered":"99 Lead Balloons… Are About To Come Crashing Down"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

99 Lead Balloons… Are About To Come Crashing Down<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

‘Lead balloon.’<\/strong> That graphic description of public failure apparently dates from the US in 1924, and ironically was itself such a poorly-received idiom that it didn\u2019t appear in the American press again until 1947. A few decades later, and the phrase was so well known that a derivative of it inspired one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Today, 99 lead balloons fill our sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To illustrate the point I don\u2019t even have to look at headlines about the US-China trade war \u2013 though I could pick any number of them showing how serious this is getting, and how global the impact is likely to be<\/strong>. My favourite today contains a quote from a US semiconductor maker who states \u201cWe\u2019re too far into free trade that the world cannot have countries not trading<\/em>.\u201d Sorry mate, 1913 called and wants its \u2018Great Illusion<\/a>\u2019 back;<\/strong> indeed, reports are that China\u2019s surveillance camera-maker Hikvision is next in the US firing line<\/a><\/strong>. Standing with me not on the side of the (Norman) Angells is Eli Lake writing for Bloomberg, who argues \u201c<\/em>The tech cold war has begun. To which I can only say: It\u2019s about time<\/a><\/em><\/strong>. If this ban is just a bit of brinkmanship designed to pry a better trade deal out of Beijing, however, then it\u2019s a blunder. The national security implications raised by Huawei\u2019s technology transcend any trade dispute.\u201d <\/em>And while US tech is in the headlines, so is US farming, where federal subsidies are set to rise sharply to offset trade-war pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could choose from a series of stories in\u00a0Turkey, where the authorities are both trying to prop up the currency and cutting rates at the same time(?)<\/strong>, as well as about to clash with the US and NATO allies again over their preferred choice of anti-aircraft defence system in a\u00a0major\u00a0<\/em>way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

99 Lead Balloons… Are About To Come Crashing Down ‘Lead balloon.’ That graphic description of public failure apparently dates from the US in 1924, and ironically was itself such a poorly-received idiom that it didn\u2019t appear in the American press again until 1947. A few decades later, and the phrase was so well known that a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[130,23375,25927,24135,805,3222,827],"class_list":["post-46297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-china","tag-huawei","tag-lead-balloon","tag-michael-every","tag-trade","tag-trade-war","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46298,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46297\/revisions\/46298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}